1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for forecasting a workforce demand. In particular, the present invention describes a method and system for forecasting a workforce demand that is capable of integrating information regarding different factors.
2. Description of the Related Art
Workforce management and planning are significant drivers of profitability for many businesses, especially for those with a large number of employees and complex product/solution portfolios. As a key component in the workforce management process, the objective of workforce demand forecasting is to predict how many people of what skill categories are going to be required throughout a given period of time (e.g., a quarter). An accurate forecast on the workforce demand provides crucial input to many business decision processes, including skills capacity planning (determining what level of workforce of what particular skill mix should be maintained), deployment decisions (who to assign to what project), and sales strategies (what particular solution should be pushed based on available resources).
In the increasingly complex business environment, workforce demand is not determined by any single factor, but influenced by many factors with varying degrees of uncertainty, including status of ongoing engagements, potential signings, revenue targets, market trends, etc. Because of such complexity, existing resource forecasting methods such as the ones used for forecasting computing resource data are not adequate, as they mostly rely on extrapolation based on past resource requirements and do not provide ways to incorporate other factors. Thus, a more comprehensive method for workforce demand forecasting is needed.